I’m not at E3 and I didn’t watch any of the live streams, but I’ve been catching up on the news of the day.
SW:TOR – Yet another movie. It’s a geat movie and it breaks my heart how much better it is than Episodes 1 and 2 (I gave up and never saw 3), but this is a game not a movie. I want to see more gameplay video.
Batman: Arkham City – I caught this inteview and gameplay demo on RPS, and man does this game look great.
Minecraft – It’s cool that Minecraft is coming to XBLA. I’m not interested in Kinect integration though and I’m not sure I’ll bother to buy the Xbox version. Half of the fun of Minecraft is modding it after all.
Mass Effect 3 – I’m surprised how much they’re showing of the game. I expected Bioware to be pretty quiet about it since it was pushed back. I’m honestly struggling a little bit with what I’m seeing in the many videos. It looks like the pace of combat has sped up considerable, which is great if you’re an FPS fan but I’m not. Still, I’m keeping in mind the lessons from ME2 where the marketing gave me a lot of bad vibes that turned out to be completely false.
Kinect Sidenote: All of the Kinect tie-ins worry me a bit. I’m really hoping Microsoft doesn’t manage to figure out something cool enough that’ll make me want to buy one. It’s not that I hate the Kinect or anything, but my Xbox is in my office which is a small fourth bedroom in my house, and there just isn’t room to set one up and stand 8 feet away from it. Well not without remodeling.
Sony Update: I’m adding this a day late since I didn’t watch it live or stay up to see the post-conference news about it. I was impressed with Tretton’s apology, but I think Sony would’ve done itself a world of good to do that earlier though. Not being a PS3 owner, more of the news I didn’t care about but there were two things I wanted to mention.
PS Vita – That is not a good name, but that’s nitpicking. As cool as the technology sounds, the only thing I thought about when reading about the new portable was that I have a PSP that’s in a box in my closet and I haven’t played with it in more than a year. Even when I was using it, it was basically a Lumines machine. They did get the price right at least.
Dust 514 – Being an exclusive is a mistake. Yes, I’m sure there were business/technical issues with Microsoft but I don’t care. CCP’s new shooter is going to be competing with a lot of established brands and limiting sales to just one console is not a good idea. I’m under the impression that the game is not coming to PC, but hopefully I’m wrong about that. Then again even if it does, I have to wonder if PC players and PS3 players will be able to play together. They can’t in DCUO.
The emphasis on Kinect worried me too, but if you watched the EA and Ubisoft press conferences, they barely mentioned Kinect. So while MS is pushing it hard, it doesn’t seem like 3rd parties are drinking the Kool-Aid. At least not yet.
That’s good to know, thanks. I’ve tried before to watch E3 presentations but the presenters are usually so awkward and the content is so PR-flat that I get bored and decide I’d rather actually be playing a game.
Well, III had…ummm…Ok, I got nothing. When I came out of the theater from seeing that, my initial reaction was “I would have rather watched two hours of Jar Jar pleasuring himself.” (but expressed much less politely). I now consider it OK purely as a visual spectacle if you can turn your brain off. But the endless chain stupidity that is the plot and most of the dialogue still grates me whenever I think about it. One of the most disappointing movies I have ever seen (and I wasn’t expecting much after I and II).
That trailer, on the other hand, is six minutes of awesome.
Wow, makes me glad I didn’t bother with three then.